All of the King's Horses - ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg Campaign Session Recap & Report

 So we finally after a couple of weeks hiatus returned to our ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg Campaign. During last night's session we had the PC's defending the humans against the Grey aggressors. The human colonists were badly outnumbered & had settled on one of the Grey colonies instead of their own planets because of the Greys having vital resources. The Greys gave then twenty four months to get off planet before wiping them out. So this is going to pick right up from this blog entry here. 

The players PC's want this star system because there's a megastructure orbiting around the local star. This means that both the colonists and the PC's are actually in the wrong but command doesn't care. What the PC's don't know is that the bugs have several minor hives on the megastructure orbiting the star. 

Right at the moment the PC's are trying to hold out until a group of Starvaulter knights arrive in power armor. There is a wrinkle in the fact that the Starvaulter knights are going sort the situation out one way or another. 

Bug Holdings & Dyson Spheres - - ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg

 This blog entry picks right up from this blog entry here.  Over the weekend I began thinking again about  Gary Gygax's B2 The Keep on the Borderlands & how it relates to back into the Grey's backstory. To whom do the caves of chaos belong?! And who would claim the humanoid chaos infected army?! A standing army waiting to moved into ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg campaign affair is interesting. 

The Grays have taken over the old Elven works and churned out a load of humanoids to help manage a small bug problem on one of their worlds. The Greys have 'dimensionally gated' in to various worlds humanoid armies before to deal with 'bug infestations'. The mind influenced humanoids are violent, highly agressive, & easily manueverable towards their targets. 

I can see the bugs also doing interstellar megastructures such as Dyson swarms. Creating Dyson smarms from nearby stars & then moving them near to hive planets to fuel their mega hives. But what is a Dyson swarm? According to the Dyson sphere wiki entry; "The variant closest to Dyson's original conception is the "Dyson swarm". It consists of a large number of independent constructs (usually solar power satellites and space habitats) orbiting in a dense formation around the star. This construction approach has advantages: components could be sized appropriately, and it can be constructed incrementally.^[10] Various forms of wireless energy transfer could be used to transfer energy between swarm components and a planet.

Disadvantages resulting from the nature of orbital mechanics would make the arrangement of the orbits of the swarm extremely complex. The simplest such arrangement is the Dyson ring, in which all such structures share the same orbit. More-complex patterns with more rings would intercept more of the star's output, but would result in some constructs eclipsing others periodically when their orbits overlap.^[11] Another potential problem is that the increasing loss of orbital stability when adding more elements increases the probability of orbital perturbations.

Such a cloud of collectors would alter the light emitted by the star system (see below). However, the disruption compared to a star's overall natural emitted spectrum would most likely be too small for Earth-based astronomers to observe"
What does any of this have to do with 'Secrets of The Nethercity'?! The city of Cyfaraun may have been an interstellar  trade point in the ancient past thousands of years ago. And one of the bugs specialist leader castes the  Khepri. The Greys came up into their own right at the point when the Elves were worshipping Chaos. The Chaos gods ascended into several worlds where the Greys had established colonial holdings causing conflict. The Khepri took full advantage of this conflict to establish themselves. The Khepri are the interstellar equivalent of cockroaches. They take advantage of races by making beach heads in many worlds.

Because of the power vacuum left by so many of the precursor alien races the bugs have moved into ascendency in the greater Megellanic cloud. 
The Cloud Giants are not entirely gone & occassionally mount full extermination crusades against the bugs. PC's have to be careful not to get caught up in the huge radiation or the interstellar  WMD deployed during these crusades. 

Skinnies have been moving into some of the bug's Dyson spheres. They've taken over manufacturing certain stellar products & using the engines to work on their own  holdings.And there is evidence that the Terran empire itself controls several Dyson spheres & they have been trying to make deals for a Grey  stellar engines or two. 

The PC's are interested in capturing a bug Dyson sphere but their very scared of the bug's stellar fleet & holdings. They think that the Terran empire has further information. 

Grey Alien Megastructures - ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg

 Yesterday afternoon, I took a bit of time to refine some campaign ideas when it comes to our ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg affair which has been taking on a life of its own. But a question came up last night post Thanksgiving meal in our local coffee shop, 'How are the Greys moving their interstellar assets  from one place to another.'  This is going to pick up right from where we left off here. 

 

So the Greys are some of the most dangerous interstellar powers around. The Greys move military & exploration assets into other intergalactic star systems & outer galaxy points. They use interstellar megastructure known as stellar engines. Specifically the Grays use the Shkadov thruster set up because the Greys are  a Type-II civilization on the Kardashev scale. The Shkadov thruster set up enables the Greys to take full advantage for the star systems that they settle in. But why?! Because let's look at the Wiki entry on the system set up; "One of the simplest examples of a stellar engine is the Shkadov thruster (named after Dr. Leonid Shkadov who first proposed it), or a Class A stellar engine.^[4] Such an engine is a stellar propulsion system, consisting of an enormous mirror/light sail—actually a massive type of solar statite large enough to classify as a megastructure—which would balance gravitational attraction towards and radiation pressure away from the star. Since the radiation pressure of the star would now be asymmetrical, i.e. more radiation is being emitted in one direction as compared to another, the 'excess' radiation pressure acts as net thrust, accelerating the star in the direction of the hovering statite. Such thrust and acceleration would be very slight, but such a system could be stable for millennia. Any planetary system attached to the star would be 'dragged' along by its parent star. For a star such as the Sun, with luminosity 3.85 × 10²⁶ W and mass 1.99 × 10³⁰ kg, the total thrust produced by reflecting half of the solar output would be 1.28 × 10¹⁸ N. After a period of one million years this would yield an imparted speed of 20 m/s, with a displacement from the original position of 0.03 light-years. After one billion years, the speed would be 20 km/s and the displacement 34,000 light-years, a little over a third of the estimated width of the Milky Way galaxy." 

A digitally colorized pen & ink drawing of two grey alien By MjolnirPants

The Greys move their star systems where they want & before you know it they will be on your PC's doorsteps. The Greys came up into their own right at the point when the Elves were worshipping Chaos. The Chaos gods ascended into several worlds where the Greys had established colonial holdings causing conflict. The Khepri took full advantage of this conflict to establish themselves. The Khepri are the interstellar equivalent of cockroaches. They take advantage of races by making beach heads in many worlds. 'The Secrets of the Nethercity' have a killer example of these Khepri outpost. Are the Khepri a precursor race?! We shall see. 

And its within this point that the Greys became a bit corrupted by Chaos & began to cross breed their own humanoid Chaos based troops. But these are seldom used because of the swath of destruction that they cause. The Greys have a number of Dyson spheres that they use to sometimes for stellar engineering & the occasional star system cleansing. 
But it is only recently that the Greys have began to build  Caplan thrusters; "Astronomer Matthew E. Caplan of Illinois State University has proposed a type of stellar engine that uses concentrated stellar energy (repurposing the mirror statites from Class A) to excite certain regions of the outer surface of the star and create beams of solar wind for collection by a multi-Bussard ramjet assembly. The ramjets would produce directed plasma to stabilize its orbit, and jets of oxygen-14 to push the star. Using rudimentary calculations that assume maximum efficiency, Caplan estimates the Bussard engine would use 10¹² kg of solar material per second to produce a maximum acceleration of 10⁻⁹ m/s², yielding a velocity of 200 km/s after 5 million years, and a distance of 10 parsecs over 1 million years. While theoretically the Bussard engine would work for 100 million years given the mass loss rate of the Sun, Caplan deems 10 million years to be sufficient for a stellar collision avoidance.^[5] His proposal was commissioned by the German educational YouTube channel Kurzgesagt" 
Much of this technology came from a technological exchange with the 'Cloud Giants' and has been stolen by the Skinnies. But the Greys are working on several  secret project and its here that the PC's have very recently began to inquire. 

The alien necromancers of Narri have been at war with the Grey over several star systems causing the Greys to field plasmas based weapons. We've been looking into using  Alternative Armies Ion Age miniatures to simulate one or more of the races we're playing with.  And the bat just got moved up. 

Megastructures Expanding Our Campaign Scope - ACK's Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu & Colonial Troopers Knight Hawks rpg

 So the other day my father & I were stuck in a garage waiting room waiting for a car repair. Whist there I grabbed a holiday flyer & with a ball point pen I outlined a good chunk of the upcoming Colonial ACK's campaign. A campaign setting combination of Colonial Troopers & Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg. And the subject of the 'Precursors' alien race came up. The 'Precursors' are a series of alien races that existed in the previous universe to ours.  The 'Precursors' are now awakening after billions of years & the Terran Empire is fleeing before them.  This is going to pick up right from last week's session report. 

For one of these races I'm using  the Zaharan empire from Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg's Sepulcher of the Sorceress-Queen as the basis for this power. An empire of space going necromancers capable of raising undead alien troops to rase planets. They also used negative planar energies for megastructure construction. The power vacuum that they left behind on the interstellar scene was taken over by the Greys. 

 

The Greys have been in charge for a long time or so they think. They found some of the interstellar technological works of the 'Precursors' & knew enough not to mess with them. Instead they used their own stellar harvesters to shepherd any number of new stars for Star lifting. And the Greys practiced stellar husbandry for thousands of years.  But they crossed paths with 'the Bugs' who created massive hive Dyson spheres & began raiding the Grey's gas giant refineries. 
The Greys meanwhile have treaty with the Cloud Giants, this is one of the first races to emerge after the 'Big Bang' & the cloud giants use a variation on Stellar engine principle. They used this to create mini planes for themselves to explore the multiverse. They also taught the Greys stellar husbandry to take over some of their star fields. The Could Giants retreated into their own star systems after overseeing a galatic empire for several million years. They simply walked away leaving space dungeons & ruins in their wakes. 

 

There has been some speculation among my players that  Kanahu is actually an  Alderson disk just like Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is. There have been no adventures nor revelations confirming or denying this. And this brings up the Skinnies who within our campaigns have several Anderson disk colony worlds. 

Suddenly the players have realized that controlling one or more of these megastructures could be incredibly profitable. There are however several alien races that might have a thing or two to save about this. For the past few months I've been looking into Alternative Armies Ion Age miniatures to simulate one or more of the races we're playing with.